stopped, saving now and then
to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known as
Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boats
on account of the shallowness of the water.

Leaving a guard of one hundred and sixty men to protect their boats as
a place of refuge in case they should be worsted before Panama, they
turned and plunged into the wilderness before them.

There a more powerful foe awaited them than a host of Spaniards
with match, powder, and lead--starvation. They met but little or no
opposition in their progress; but wherever they turned they found every
fiber of meat, every grain of maize, every ounce of bread or meal, swept
away or destroyed utterly before them. Even when the buccaneers had
successfully overcome an ambuscade or an attack, and had sent the
Spaniards flying, the fugitives took the time to strip their dead
comrades of every grain of food in their leathern sacks, leaving nothing
but the empty bags.

Says the narrator of these events, himself one of the expedition, "They
afterward fell to eating those leathern bags, as affording something to
the ferment of their stomachs."

Ten days they struggled through this bitter privation, doggedly forcing
their way onward, faint with hunger and haggard with weakness and fever.
Then, from the high hill and over the tops of the forest trees, they saw
the steeples of Panama, and nothing remained between them and their goal
but the fighting of four Spaniards to every one of them--a simple thing
which they had done over and over again.

Down they poured upon Panama, and out came the Spaniards to meet them;
four hundred horse, two thousand five hundred foot, and two thousand
wild bulls which had been herded together to be driven over the
buccaneers so that their ranks might be disordered and broken. The
buccaneers were only eight hundred strong; the others had either
fallen in battle or had dropped along the dreary pathway through the
wilderness; but in the space of two hours the Spaniards were flying
madly over the plain, minus six hundred who lay dead or dying behind
them.

As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there and
then for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never more
at home than in the slaughter of cattle.

Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting and
they were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging,
dram-drinking, and giving